To support business continuity, a replication relationship is established between a primary virtual machine running a production workload at a primary site and a recovery virtual machine at a recovery site. Thereafter, changes caused by modifications to the production workload are sent from the primary virtual machine to the recovery virtual machine. This replication relationship may allow an administrator to failover the production workload to the recovery virtual machine when an event (e.g., disaster) occurs at the primary site that affects the primary virtual machine.
In some instances, an unscheduled power outage, hardware failure, inadvertent administrator change, or the like, may cause a break in a replication relationship. This may result in inconsistent data between a primary virtual machine and a recovery virtual machine. To reestablish consistent data, a production workload may be sent from a primary site to a recovery site. This requires a large amount of data to be transferred to the recovery site, which is time consuming and utilizes significant network bandwidth. In addition, a failover of the production workload to the recovery site is not possible while sending all, or even a portion, of the production workload to the recovery site.
In some instances, a recovery virtual machine may be initialized for data replication by receiving large amounts of data from a primary virtual machine and storing the data. The large amounts of data required for initialization of the recovery virtual machine may be received over a network (e.g., as a data stream) or off the network (e.g., shipped to the recovery site). In either case, receiving large amounts of data from the primary virtual machine typically takes significant amounts of time (e.g., to receive a shipped copy of the primary virtual machine) and/or network bandwidth.